Interviews

Gears of War 2 Multiplayer Interview

GameSpy: How will co-op work when playing on different difficulties? For instance, if one person is playing on Insane and the other is on Casual.

Rod Fergusson: Well, except for some very minor exceptions, the experience whether you play on Casual or Insane is very much the same. We didn't want it to be like "Oh, I played on Casual and one-third of the enemies spawned," or anything like that where it's almost a completely different game. We tend to manage difficulty based on the damage you deal, the damage you take, your health, all that kind of stuff. But it's kind of under the cover.

That's how we deal with it with co-op. So, the Casual player might be doing more damage than the person on Insane, or they have more health than the person on Insane. It's all sort of under the covers, so it's not like you have more or less enemies to fight.

GameSpy: What about on Horde? Does it change if you're playing with two people as opposed to five?

Rod Fergusson: Yeah, and I have a suspicion that split-screen Horde is going to be really popular. We worked pretty hard to balance it out. So there are some behaviors that we control, like how many Locust are alive on the map at any given time, based on your team size. If you're playing Horde by yourself, which you can do, it will be different with a different number of enemies alive. The total number of enemies in the wave will be the same. Like let's say on this particular wave there's 16. You'll still fight 16 guys, but you may only fight them in fours and fives instead of eights and nines. Also, at the end of a round, if you're on a five-man team, when they get to like five enemies left, they'll start charging you and coming at you directly. We had to dial that back too. If you're alone, you can't have five guys jump you at once, so when there's one or two they'll come at you. We made some adjustments for team size, for sure.

GameSpy: There's a Gears of War comic book and novel coming out, and it almost seems like it was built to be a multimedia-friendly property. Are we going to be seeing more Gears of War in different forms in the future?

Rod Fergusson: Well, I sure hope so! [Laughs] Obviously stuff like that is pretty much demand-driven. We don't count our chickens before they hatch. If there's going to be a second novel, it's because everything is business-driven and the first was successful. We did, from the very beginning, create it to be a transmedia property, so that it could be applied to a movie or a comic or a novel. We've been very cognizant of not arbitrarily defining things that would inhibit us from doing different things. Ultimately, it's the fans that will decide that.